July Vote Incentive

Ok, first off, apologies for letting the last one linger for three months. I’ve had this picture ready for a bit, but I felt a little guilty about posting it because it’s not Grrl Power related. It’s another cover mockup where I can practice both my painting and layout skills. But it’s the only other piece of art I’ve worked on besides the comic, and I draw Sydney, Max, Dabbler, and crew every day, so it’s fun to do some other stuff as well. I could practice composition with any of them, they each do present some challenges when it comes to painting. Sydney has such a distorted anime face that it’s hard to practice good facial anatomy, which is something I feel I’m quite weak with after several decades of drawing in an anime style. Maxima has her own challenges. I’ve never felt like I’ve drawn her as shiny as I imagine her, and even if I ignore that stuff, it’s not like I can practice flesh tones on her. Her skin doesn’t do subsurface scattering after all. Dabbler isn’t so hard to paint, but again, I feel like I should get better with human flesh tones before I stray into other parts of the rainbow. Of course I could paint Anvil or Harem or Jabberwokky or Varia or a dozen other characters, and eventually I will, but at the moment I’m having fun with these cover mockups, and I think that this one is a pretty good improvement over the previous one, and that’s what I’m really going for. There’s plenty more detail work I could continue to do on this piece, but I learned some stuff from working on it, and that’s the goal.

Damn, just realised that I can’t remember the names of the two girls introduced in Book 10. Which is frustrating because they were *awesome* in Book 11 and felt like a good compliment to each other. I’ll recognise them instantly when they crop up in 12, but can’t recall right now.

Hi — don’t know if you’re aware of this, Dave, but Amazon has shut down access to all of Michael-Scott Earle’s books after accusing him of somehow manipulating KDP and Kindle Unlimited. I suspect he’s just earning too many reads for their liking. I learned of his Star Justice series and got truly interested in his work from reading your comic, and I was wondering if you could use your own fame to spread the word and help him get the attention of Jeff Bezos and get those books back up there? I’ve still got a dozen I want to read!

Yeah, I’m aware. His facebook group is going crazy and everyone is emailing Amazon and doing whatever they can, but a company like Amazon doesn’t care about the livelihoods of independent writers or thousands of fans, so we don’t really know what to do. MSE isn’t the only author affected by this. Dozens are getting robbed of their income and it seems hopeless, but we have to try and do something.

Didn’t realize you guys had started a separate thread about this. Yeah, it’s a mess. I read about 15K words about it last night, as several prolific authors have pulled their books off Kindle Unlimited, to avoid the risk of being banned from Amazon.

This all goes back to a mess that probably started with (believe it or not) cockygate. I’d have been aware of this a lot earlier, but my reading went into a hiatus as real life kicked me in the groin about a dozen times just about four days before this current mess started – a wild ride that included threats about shooting me and my kids and much similar unpleasantness, six people, three dogs and two cats living in my house plus a colonscopy, all of which fired up within a week of my 65th birthday, plus or minus.

Told you my life was a roller coaster ride. It’s not dull, but I feel about like I expect Sydney feels right now, a little dull would be nice for a change.

On a very related note, Amazon has banned about half of their most prolific reviewers. Given that Michael’s books have all been pulled, I cannot tell if many of the banned ones left reviews for him or not.

RedWolfeXR’s comment on that page does about as good a job of explaining this mess as anything you’ll get on reddit. And reddit, as is well known, is absolutely filled with people that just hate on everything.

Other people have already mentioned this, but one option would be to use the teleport/truesight orb here. But another option might just be to fly at the cyclops. If sci fi tropes serve me correctly, she is currently locked in a tug of war with the tractor beam, but if she flies strait at the cyclops instead, she might be able to surprise him/her/it with a quick Halo bubble to the eye.

Got a theory about the orbs. The orbs are an extradimensional kid’s video game. 65 million years ago s/he was playing a new level and beat the dinosaur level, but while saving the game the save file got corrupted. And he hadnt saved for a while so when s/he went to his/her previous save he found that s/he lost a ton of his/her upgrades. Frustrated s/he threw his game into the ocean and left to play a different game. Sort of like how I quit mass effect when the disc got scratched and by the time I got a replacement game Ialready had gotten into other games and never went back to finishing mass effect.

Dave, reading your “blog” entry under the comic, and seeing you stumble over how to describe technology levels of various civilizations, especially in regards to energy levels… I would like to suggest looking up the “Kardashev Scale”.

Our modern civilization here on Earth does not even register on the scale, so we could be described as a is a Kardashev Type 0 civilization. A civilization that can build a Dyson sphere would need to be at least a Kardashev Type 2 civilization. The scale increases at a rate well beyond even exponential.

Type 1 is marshaling the amount of power equivalent to the amount of power that their planet receives from their star in a day.

Type 2 is marshaling the amount of power equivalent to what their star outputs.

Type 3 is marshaling the amount of power equivalent to their entire galaxy.

Type 4 (which Kardashev did not describe but which is often described as a natural progression of the scale) is marshaling power equivalent to the output of their entire universe.

I don’t think that’s right… According to the book written about Galen, it takes extensive self-modification and many years of training to become a Technomage and use their stuff. While Sydney is far from mastery of the Orbs, she could use some stuff immediately and more can be unlocked with absolutely no understanding of what the unlock does or leads to. And Technomages still had to use spacecraft…

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